“Your customers are yours to lose” & “Nobody has it all together”

Aug 18, 2016

My current weekday schedule includes 45 minutes of learning. I read about iOS development; watch WWDC talks; listen to various podcasts on iOS, app development, or technology; read articles; watch app tutorials on youtube; or something else that is beneficial for me at the time.

This is a great way to continue to learn but not get overwhelmed by the fact that there is always something else to learn.

In an episode of Under the Radar, a podcast about independent app development, Marco Arment and David Smith give quick answers to various questions and talking points submitted by listeners.

The last talking point was quite applicable to me in my state as a new developer just releasing my first few apps in the app store:

“Things you now know that you wish you could have told your younger developer selves when just starting out.”

Marco:

your actions and your app that you do to your customers are way more important in a competitive landscape than what you’re competitors are doing. If your app already has people using it, they are yours to lose.

People don’t usually flee to other apps because of some competitor’s feature that attracted them over there, they flee to other apps because your app is sucking in some way. You’re neglecting something, you’re not addressing something, you’re not fixing something, you’re being too slow to adapt something new – whatever the case may be. Your customers are usually yours to lose and so what you do is way more important than what your competitors do.

David:

Absolutely. I think my best advice that I would give my younger self is that nobody has it all together, and this is to address the sort of like the imposter syndrome kind of a problem that, early on in my my career, I struggled with a lot. I still do in some ways but it’s so easy to look at someone else’s output and judge the output, not the process that it took for them to get there. It’s easy to look at the output and say “Wow, look at all, this is perfect.” As though we’re somehow born, it was birthed magically into the world, which just this perfect process that was effortless and without problem. It’s like when the reality is we all make mistakes, we all have like the development process is often messy and uncomfortable and we have lots of failures.

Some of those are public, some of those are private, but nobody has it all together. We’re all just fumbling our way through, and the more I was able to wrap my head around that and be comfortable with that reality, the more honestly that I was just able to make better software, because I was less worried about comparing myself to this impossible standard that I imagined other people were living up to, and just did my best and that worked out a lot better.